The sky is falling. Again.
It falls every few years, if you watch the right channels. Inflation. Recession. Rate hikes. Geopolitical chaos. A specific kind of financial pundit who has been predicting a crash since 2011 and will eventually be right and will never, ever let you forget it.
And every time, millions of people do the exact same thing: they panic, they sell, they lock in their losses, they sit in cash waiting for the "right time" to get back in. Then the market recovers without them. Then they get back in near the top. Then it dips again. Then they panic again.
This is called emotional investing. The financial industry has a more polite name for it: "timing the market." Either way, the data on it is devastating. It doesn't work. It has never worked. The people who do it consistently underperform the people who do essentially nothing.
"Nothing, in this context, means: buy a broad index fund. Set up automatic contributions. Do not look at it during market downturns. Do not sell."
Do not listen to the guy on TV who sounds very serious and very certain about what's coming next. He doesn't know. Nobody does. That's the secret the whole industry is built on top of.
Here's what we do know: the market has recovered from every single crash in its history. Every one. The Great Depression. Black Monday. The dot-com bust. 2008. COVID. Every time people said this time is different, it wasn't. The people who stayed in recovered. The people who sold locked in their losses and missed the bounce.
My father lived through all of it. He watched markets collapse. He watched people around him panic. He did not panic. He held. He contributed. He let time do what time does to money when you leave it alone long enough.
The most dangerous financial advice isn't the obvious scam. It's the reasonable-sounding panic. The concerned news anchor. The "just protecting yourself" logic that sounds smart and costs you decades of compounding.
Chicken Little ran around telling everyone the sky was falling. He never built anything. He never owned anything. He never let anything grow.
Don't be Chicken Little. Be boring. Be patient. Be wealthy.
How to Die Broke — the book about staying calm, staying in, and letting the system work for you instead of against you.
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